"I particularly condemn the way our political leaders supplied the
manpower for that war. The policies - determining who would be
drafted and who would be deferred, who would serve and who would
escape, who would die and who would live - were an antidemocratic
disgrace. I can never forgive a leadership that said, in effect: These
young men - poorer, less educated, less privileged - are expendable
(someone described them as 'economic cannon fodder'), but the rest are
too good to risk. I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful
and well placed and so many professional athletes (who were probably
healthier than any of us) managed to wangle slots in Reserve and
National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw
class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that
all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country."

page 148 "MY AMERICAN JOURNEY" by Colin Powell

Copyright 1995 by Colin L. Powell

published by Random House

ISBN 0-679-43296-5

Final COLLEGE FOOTBALL 2014 through results of 2015 JANUARY 12 MONDAY - NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME
this output has three parts: (1) teams listed by RATING top-to-bottom
(2) CONFERENCE AVERAGES
(listed top-to-bottom & alphabetically)
(3) teams listed by CONFERENCE
(listed in order within conferences)
The SCHEDULE ratings represent what the rating would have to be for a
hypothetical team to have a mathematical expectation of winning precisely 50%
of their games against the schedule played by the team in question in the games
that it has played so far. The schedule difficulty of each given game takes
into account the rating of the opponent and the location of the game. This
is the same concept that is used in computing the WIN50% conference ratings.
In COLLEGE FOOTBALL the W-L records include ALL games, but ONLY
games between the 252 TEAMS RATED here are used for RATING and SCHEDULE
STRENGTH computations.
To make predictions for upcoming games, simply compare the RATINGS of
the teams in question and allow an ADDITIONAL 3 points for the home
team. Thus, for example, a HOME team with a rating of 92 would be
favored by 5 points over a VISITING team having a rating of 90.
Or a VISITING team with a rating of 89 would be favored by 7 points
over a HOME team having a rating of 79.
NOTE: Use whatever home advantage is listed in the output below.
In the example just above, a home edge of 3 was shown for
illustrative purposes. The home edge will vary during the season.
Several different home edges are shown, one for each of the several different type of ratings
directly over their respective columns.

The numbers to the right of a team's schedule strength
are its rank of schedule - (in parentheses) - and its
record versus teams in these rating'sCURRENT top 10
and top 30 respectively.

Teams that appear to be tied to two decimal places in a given column are actually
different when carried to more decimal places in the computer's internal arithmetic.
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GOLDEN_MEAN is completely SCORE BASED but with a different algorithm than the PURE POINTS
and thus should be a good match for the PURE POINTS in terms of predictive accuracy for upcoming games.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In ELO_SCORE, the score determines what fraction of a victory was attained but since the maximum
fraction is ONE(1.00), no matter how big the score is, it prevents running up the score to be that advantageous;
It is slightly less accurate in its predictions for upcoming games than is the PURE POINTS or GOLDEN_MEAN,
in which the score is the only thing that matters. PURE POINTS is also known as PREDICTOR,
BALLANTINE, RHEINGOLD, WHITE OWL and is a very good PREDICTOR of future games.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The overall RATING is a synthesis of the three different methods, with more total weight
to the two completely SCORE-BASED methods and thus should be a good predictor in its own right.

Conference Rankings

There are three group ratings, the "central mean", the
"simple average" (also known as the "arithmetic mean",)
and the WIN50%.
The "central mean" gives the most weight to the middle team(s)
in the group and progressively less weight to teams as you go
away from the middle in either direction, up or down.
This tends to smooth out the effect of anomalous teams that are rated
much higher and lower than the middle team(s) in the group. The
"simple average" ("arithmetic mean") weights each team equally
no matter where they are relative to the middle.
Here are a few examples of how the "central mean" is computed.
4-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-2-1
5-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-2-1
6-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-3-2-1
7-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-4-3-2-1
8-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1
9-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1
10-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-4-5-5-4-3-2-1
11-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1
12-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-4-5-6-6-5-4-3-2-1
13-team group ___ the weights are 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-6-5-4-3-2-1
This is an expanded version of the "tri-mean".
The WIN50% is the rating required to win 50% of the games if playing an
infinite number of round-robins in the given group at a neutral location.